About
I'm Emily Nick Howard (they or she), a writer and maker. I am grateful to be approaching the portion of life conventionally called "middle age." You can find out more about my interests, beliefs, and personality by reading the contents of this website. Thank you for being here.
If you're looking for "web manifesto," this essay is about as close as I've got. If you're curious about why I choose to self-publish through this website, you can find my rationale here.
About This Site
This website is listed on Gossip's Web: the Directory of Handmade Web Pages.
Every page on this site was hand-coded by me using HTML and CSS only. As I build this site, I find that two sets of values are coming to the fore:
Accessibility & Sustainability
These are features that I have built in or plan to build in as my skills grow:
- mobile responsiveness
- high-contrast text
- lightweight, fast-loading pages and images
- dark mode capability
- semantic tags and alt text for screen readers
A website is a place for connection, a place to transmit ideas, experiences, and feelings from human to human. Building a website is simultaneously an act of creativity and service. My website is full of content that I have created because I’m me, but if I don’t design it in such a way that it’s widely accessible, I am failing to use it as a tool of communication.
Progress over Perfection
That being said, even a small website takes a lot of time to build by hand. I appreciate your patience as I learn and I don’t expect to get everything right the first time.
I am also an incremental builder. You may come one day and see that the background color is different than a week before or that some pages have been shuffled around. I’m not the kind of person who can keep a website the same and then completely redesign when I want to change it. I do see a complete redesign in this site’s future, but until then I will be fiddling with things on and off. It’s just my way.
I am not a developer or coder; I have no background in computer science, UI/UX, or graphic design. I’m just a person who for some reason enjoys messing with HTML and CSS to make things functional and attractive. I appreciate this site as a container for imperfection and messiness.
I don't have a Web Manifesto, but the closest thing is this essay about online spaces.
This site is, and will always be, under construction.
About the Content
My main goal in creating this website has been to share my writing. I had a backlog of poems and prose pieces that I was just tired of keeping hidden so I wanted to post them here. I also want to use it as a place to store and share various interests. The rest of the content will probably come and go, but you can expect the pages of my writing to always be populated with something.